00:00:09 Speaker 1: From Mediator's World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's we can review with Ryan kel Kell and now here's kel. If you play with your outdoor cat and feed that cat more meat, it is less likely to kill and far less likely to bring home. It's kill to you. A new study titled provision of high meat content food and object play reduce predation of wild animals by domestic cats Felis Catus from the journal Current Biology, aimed at making quote positive contributions to cat husbandry, which sounds like something you would find in the bowels of the internet. But I assure you is not that person who wears a cat sweater every day of the year getting hitched. She cleared the cat with her tongue. That's just getting weird, so put those claws away. This is real, meaningful science in a real scientific journal, which had to be developed because people can't stand the thought of keeping their p on everything murderous house cat in the house. This study found that households where high meat protein grain free food and households where five to ten minutes of daily object play recorded decreases of thirty and respectively in numbers of animals captured and brought home by cats. So let's recap all we've learned on Cow's wee can review about outdoor cats. Outdoor cats kill over three billion birds a year, over five billion small mammals and reptiles a year. And in order for people to take a little responsibility, right that word that your folks or friend or spouse used when you wanted the cat, you have to feed it, you have to pick up after it. That speech, you recall that all you have to do to take responsibility for that cat is keep it inside or slightly less effective, put an annoying, unattractive color on the cat, or as of now, change the cat's diet, and pay the cat a little more attention. It just occurred to me this talk is kind of similar to another talk a lot of kids get when they get to a certain age. You know, the most effective way to avoid all of these unwanted or unplanned circumstances is abstinence. And I'm sure, just like the people who give that speech and high school's feel as I do, that the people I'm talking to, the outdoor cat people in this circumstance won't even try lope. This week, we've got listener emails, Cicada's Old Teeth and so much more. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week. And my week as well as this podcast is brought to you by the fine folks at Steel Power Equipment. If you were thinking about getting into a clean, quiet, lightweight use inside or outside of your house, battery powered chainsaw make it a steal. You can throw that tight little package inside your vehicle under the seat and no one will know you were equipped to handle the unforeseen fund killer of a down tree in the middle of the road, or even a bison that needs to be parted up, because they'll never smell it down there. They'll just be impressed when you whip it out and use it. This smells gone for good. It's not easy. My week has been interesting. We got into some perch, big ones and pretty consistent. For once, Old Musky chat signs West and I headed out at five am below zero to conquer the mighty perch. We brought enough equipment along to make the uninitiated think that we had somehow funded our own polar expedition. I'm happy to report that I located and caught the first perch of the day and sad to report that it was my last. I just watched as everyone else yanked the fish out after that. Fortunately for me, O muskie chat as a serious fish allergy, So by taking his fish, I actually got to save a life. Am I a hero? I really can't say, but yes. The other thing that has been happening is more bad bills from here in the state of Montana. Keep in mind, friends and neighbors. This is the opinion section of the podcast. This legislative session, we have ways to privatize wildlife, ways to monetize wildlife, ways to disenfranchise the public hunter, ways to relegate our fishing game to an agency that could have the power to maybe suggest ways of managing wildlife but not implement it, And ways to flat out get rid of public land. If you were familiar with the reproductive theory of predators swamping, where a all the little baby deer l kit the ground at the same time, so when they're at their weakest and most vulnerable, old Mr grizz or Mr black Bear and Mr Wolf can only gobble up so many before the rest are able to really turn those wobbling knees into lightning. Or if you're more of an acorn or acorn specialist. Those tree nuts don't drop one at a time, they drop en mass, so at least a few make it past the white tail and squirrel into the ground. I feel like this is what is happening right now in the state of Montana. It's the legislature's way of swamping all of us folks who want and have the right to say and how our collective wildlife is managed. Go to Montana Free press dot org forward slash Capital Tracker, which is something I found the other day which helps in the searching of new bills. Or there is the old standby Montana l e G dot G o V and take a look at this list hot off the press. L C two would create additional landownered ELK tags and a five bonus point incentive to landowners sponsored cow hunters. HB three and Act prohibiting the future sales of land granted to the state HB four one seven and Act prohibiting the limiting of tags in areas where ELK are over objective. Of course, the newly amended HB one three, which now states that nonresident combination tags can get the preferential treatment for only an additional three dollars s B one five three, which would put the state Parks Board in charge of wildlife management areas and phishing access sites. If anyone wants to get into these a little deeper, please go to the aforementioned sites, read up and write in two A s K C A L at the meat eater dot com. And remember that these are undoubtedly undubitably similar to propose is legislation in your home state. If you want to be a conservationist, or if you own that shirt that says hunting is conservation, this is a big, big part of it should be a disclaimer that goes along with that shirt when you purchase it. Moving on to the update section, those darn kids Boisey State students admitted to dumping all those tasty birds in the dumpster behind the fred Meyer and Garden City, Idaho. And this is what I have to say to you. Quack eatas. Cut duck breast filets into pieces about the size of your finger, Roll them and flour with salt, pepper and chili powder. Flash fry them at medium high tamp in oil or fat, do not overcook. Drain, then pile that into some corn or flower tortillas. With whatever fahita mixings that you like, You'll be coming back for thirds. That's from George. And if a couple of college kids can't get that one right, you need to get a job in a kitchen. Thanks for writing in, George. Next up, you remember the Rome New York fellow with the quote makeshift grill that was accused of possibly cooking a domestic dog. Well, things are looking good for him. Cornell University, according to New York Utica Too, says it is certain the meat is not domestic dog, but he's not out of the rough yet. No, don't barket me for that one. Put those hackles down. If it is found to be a coyote, the case will be turned over to the state Department of Environmental Conservation. If it's determined to be a domestic animal, charges could be issued under Agriculture and Markets animal cruelty laws. In either case, I've determined this person will have the privilege of cooking possibly the most expensive meat in all of New York State. Coyote hunting season is open in New York until March. I called New York Region six Environmental Law enforce it, and they assured me that as long as the coyote was legally harvested, it is perfectly legal to cook and eat a coyote. In fact, the conservation officer I spoke with mentioned seeing a TV show filmed in New York where they ate a coyote. So is this a case of discrimination, another situation where those darned TV hosts get uh special privilege? Or did this fella eat a dog? We'll stay on top of this one. If anyone knows this backyard griller in realm, New York, let me know. Would love to hear his side of the story. I'm sure it's very short. Brett right, Sam, a representative in my state of Oregon, has introduced an extremely broad and short bill targeting the sale of fur in Oregon. Most relevant to our state's outdoor economy is that it would essentially ban the sale of flies and fly tying supplies that would include fur. Less people would have access to fishing, therefore less money would go towards fishing licenses and conservation. In this state. There is already a leather in taxidermy exemption, yet nothing related to the other myriad uses of fur. The bill is light on exemptions and broad in its target Please ask folks to write and call Representative Rob Nas and let him know that this bill is a bad idea. After reading the bill in question, Oregon House Bill to six seven six, it states that businesses such as pawn shops and second hand stores selling used for and hides are exempt as well as used for and hides with the intended purpose of traditional use, specifically for tribal members. So if it were to pass, this bill seems impossible to enforce. I think you will still be able to get your fly tying materials, but your local fly shop may just need to add some additional used equipment to qualify as a second hand shop with a lot of the bum fly fisherman. I know, a pawn shop version of a fly shop might actually be a really smart business model. Anyway, What are they fight? Not? What what they fight not? Aside from the fact that Oregon history has basically been that of fur trapping, it is important to note that the Oregon legislature temporarily prohibited beaver trapping from eighteen ninety nine until nineteen nineteen, and acted its first conservation measures in nineteen twenty and established a relocation program in nineteen thirty two. Another moratorium was placed on public beaver trapping from nineteen thirty seven until nineteen fifty one. It's important to note that that's public beaver trapping, meaning that no matter when or where are we band trapping, there's still a lot of trapping that goes on. All of this to say that beavers are very managed in the state of Oregon and have been for a long time. The fact that leather goods your exempt from this proposed legislation really makes you wonder who Representative NAS is trying to appease with this one. For is hairy leather or you could say leather is hairless fur. Either way, dead is dead, and waste is waste. I'll guarantee the animals far beyond caring if it gets turned into a boot or a toasty scarf. So let's use what we can. If you would like to weigh in on this issue, go to Oregon Legislature dot g o V and contact your elected official. Next up, hot ice the Cows, we can review ice fishing report. Massachusetts ice angler hauled out a fifteen pound, eight ounce brown trout nearly thirty three inches long, out of Stockbridge Bowl Lake. The state record is nineteen pounds ten ounces. A New York ice angler hauled out a forty five and three quarter inch four point seven pound tiger muskie on Otisco Lake. According to or the Wind, this tiger muskie is three pounds shy of the ice fishing tiger muskie world record, which coincidentally came from Otisco Lake back in two thousand nine. Like the same place, is what I'm saying. That fish weighed in at twenty seven pounds five ounces. A tiger muskie is a cross between a Musca lunge and a northern pike. Tiger muskie are commonly stocked into lakes as a form of population control. They prefer soft fin fish like suckers, but we'll eat what's available, and being a hybrid, they don't typically reproduce. Both of these anglers used tip ups, which is the trapping equivalent of fishing in Eastern Montana. Generally speaking, consult your regulations and angler can have six tip ups, which would make for a trap line. Unmanned bated lines are set below the ice. When a fish pulls the line, it trips the flag, which signals the ice angler. I have come to realize that in the ice fishing world there are a lot of ways to leave lines and attended and call it fishing. I for the record, call it fun. Moving on, Scientists with the Voyagers Wolf Project in Minnesota have been studying the summer hunting behavior of gray wolves and in the process have discovered some startling shortcomings of beavers. Most of what we know about wolves is from what we see in the winter. They hunt in packs, they chase their prey, and they concentrate mostly on big animals like full grown deer and moose. But in the summer, wolf packs become less concentrated and harder to track. Using cameras, analysis of kill sites, and data from geolocation tags to find out more, they discovered that in the summer wolves become solo ambush hunters. Instead of chasing down prey in a group, many of them parked themselves very close to beaver dam's, making sure they're down wind and wait for an unlucky beaver to waddle by. To illustrate how vulnerable to ambush hunting beavers are, the scientists set up a life sized photo realistic cardboard cutout of a wolf a few feet away from an entrance to a beaver dam. The resulting video is priceless. The cardboard cutout may as well be a photo of a ball of mud for all the attention the beavers paid to it. Yep, yep, yep, mm hmmm. Right in front of the image of the wolf, the beavers chew tree trunks apart, drag branches back to the damn They do not care. It almost seems like the beavers know the wolf photo is there and they're just trolling the scientists. They bump into the decoy, sniffle around it, drag branches by it. They knocked the decoy is skew in the process. According to the video, these are just busy beavers, not where erodents. Now. To be fair, I think we'd need to see the same experiment done with the three dimensional wolf decoy. The only thing I could strictly conclude from this experiment meant is that beavers can't translate a two dimensional image. Still, this experiment establishes some interesting ideas. First, we hadn't confirmed that wolves behaved this way in warmer months. Second, we understand better how beavers must rely on smell and hearing over sight, and even with the site limitation, there are plenty of beavers in wolf country, so they must hold their own against the big bad wolf moving on coming this spring to the eastern United States. Cicadas those insects that look like a cross between a grasshopper and a dragonfly, which are mostly known for their extremely loud buzzing. For you listeners who have never heard of cicada, they sound a bit like a rattlesnake and wind up kitchen time or going off. To those who have heard the noise, they sound like summer. The cicadas set to emerge this spring have developed a mathematical survey eival strategy. They have spent seventeen years underground as nymphs and will emerge altogether in huge numbers, coming to maturity and reproducing furiously for several weeks before dying off again. That number seventeen is not an accident. There are no broods of cicadas who emerge every sixteen or eighteen years. Seventeen is a prime number, meaning that you can only divide it evenly by one and itself, and that means that predators who reproduce and shorter cycles won't be able to synchronize effectively with the cicada boom. If a cicada brood came out every eighteen years, for example, then all the predators on cycles of two years, three years, six years, and nine years would all be ready to eat them. But every seventeen years, only some of these predators will be ready, a completely different group of predators from last boom, and so none of them are able to adapt to making cicadas a staple of their diet. You could think of this is a smart way that cicada hordes evolved using math. The other way to think about it is again predator swamping overwhelming volume. No matter how many of these cicadas, predators are able to eat, plenty will be able to survive. Lots of animals use this strategy. Japanese millipedes, for example, emerge on eight year cycles in such huge waves that they have brought the country's train system to a halt several times. That's a lot of millipedes like enough to stop a train. Cicadas are sometimes mistakenly identified as locusts, an entirely separate kind of insect that also swarms in huge numbers, although cicadas are less voracious eaters than locusts. If you have big gardening plans, for this spring. It might be good to hold off until later in June, once the mature cicadas have died and the new brood of nymphs are headed back underground for another seventeen years. Cicadas cycles are so well established in the US that distinct broods have been tracked since the eighteen nineties, and this summer's boom will be from Brood TAM, also known as the Great Eastern Brood. We'll call it the g EB. Yeah, you know me boom. The g e B is the biggest both by numbers and geographical distribution. The numbers are going to be big, like one billion insects per square mile big, and they're mating. Call of a male cicada can reach one hundred decibels, as loud as a motorcycle or for you col's we can review super fans as loud as a Kenyan Dendro high racks. Remember that little critter. So to my friends from New York to Georgia, from Delaware to Michigan, it might be a good idea to invest now in some quality ear plugs. While everyone else will be scratching their head wondering what all the racket is you'll be secure in the knowledge that you're experiencing the full flower of brewed ten. Enjoy it while you can. They won't be back until moving on to the anthropology desk. Way back in nineteen eleven, several ancient teeth were found in the cave of St. Brelade on Jersey, a small island in the English Channel near France. This has nothing to do with the Sopranos. Archaeologists knew that the Saint Berlid cave had been occupied by Neanderthals starting as long as two fifty thousand years ago, but these teeth were dated to forty eight thousand years ago, just a few thousand years before Neanderthal is completely vanished from Europe. Trying to understand this final phase of Neanderthal history, a team of scientists from the UK and Germany took new, more powerful scans of the teeth and discovered that they had an extremely unusual structure. The dimensions of the roots and crowns were consistent with Neandertal teeth, but their necks were shaped like the teeth of modern humans, and they lacked the transverse crest or transverse coal gate. No transverse crest typical of Neanderthal teeth. From this combination of anatomical characteristics, the team concluded that these teeth came from individuals who are neither fully Neanderthal nor fully Homo sapiens, but rather a hybrid of the two. This is very exciting because even though we can tell from analyzing our genome that Homo sapiens and Neanderthal's inner bread, very little physical evidence has been found that shows the anatomical results of that inner breeding. A quick bit of evolutionary history, the two branches of human ancestors that would become Neanderthals and Homo sapiens diverged about eight hundred thousand years ago. For a long time, anthropologists believe the interbreeding between the two populations would be impossible because the genetic makeup had become two distinct, and that was the majority opinion until about ten years ago. At that point, the entire Neanderthal genome had been sequenced and distinct Neanderthal genetic markers were identified. Lo and behold, if you've ever done one of those genetic tests, you probably have picked up on the news that those markers turned up in the DNA of modern humans. However, it is one thing to say. This DNA signature proves that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens fooled around way back when, And it's an entirely different thing to say. This. Here tooth that I hold in my hand is shaped this way because it came from a human neandertal hybrid physical evidence, although there have been some other physical evidence of hybrids. Teeth discovered in present day Israel, a job owed fragment in Siberia. The St. Blaid teeth of Jersey proved that Homo sapiens were interbreeding with Neandertals much later than previously thought, and much further west. Until now. The accepted story about how Neanderthals, when extinct has been Homo Sapiens showed up and out competed them or even intentionally killed them off. But these newly analyzed teeth are leading some anthropologists to wonder whether Neanderthals didn't really go extinct at all, but rather intermingled with Homo sapiens until the two populations merged. Fun fact about this one. The teeth came from a private collection, as in, someone had them squirreled away and they were analyzed now because that someone is dead some of us are going to leave behind junk, maybe, if we're lucky, something of value, and some of us are going to leave behind evidence of Neanderthal Homo sapien offspring from forty five thousand or more years ago. Kind of makes you an inch those baseball cards closer to the curb, doesn't. That's all I've got for you this week. So much to talk about and not enough time. Thanks so much for listening, and as per usual, let me know what is happening in your neck of the woods by writing into a s k c a L. That's asked cal at the Meat eater dot com. If you're loving what you're hearing, tell a friend or two. I'll talk to you next week.

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